They did not feel very tyrannical to me, but we must always allow for a subjective sense of oppression.

Theresa May yesterday unveiled a package of reviews of intrusive anti-terror legislation – "The end of Big Brother," said the Daily Mail which knows a thing or two about intrusion – including the naughty police habit of arresting people taking photos of Big Ben and other top secret locations.

There is no denying that, especially after 9/11, New Labour could be careless of civil rights, though its more high-minded critics, including chaps in wigs, were careless of the threat which ministers had to face. Parliament and the courts resisted some of the Blair-Blunkett-Reid folly for which Tory MPs often voted too, though they'd prefer to forget.

What was Gordon Brown doing about it? Plotting against Blair as usual, as today's instalment of the Mandelson memoirs again reminds us. Now there was an elective dictatorship – Gordon's over Tony – with the perpetual threat to blow up them both.

We'll see what becomes of the home secretary's reviews and wish her well. As Alan Travis reports, the "countering violent extremism" programme is also being ditched as a failure. Perhaps, like Andrew Lansley's scrapped NHS targets, it will resurface in another form.

Meanwhile, Clarke and Hailsham make an interesting pairing. Both have held the office of Lord Chancellor, both barristers, both robust public figures, not averse to a scrap, both Tories rather than more bloodless Conservatives.

But Hailsham's remark was typically insensitive of them both. It was made during the 70s when a minority Labour government struggled against serious enemies of freedom – including a still-confident Soviet Union, a bomb-planting IRA (ask them in Birmingham), plotting colonels in the home counties and a militant oil cartel which helped empower militant miners at home.

Yes, Labour under Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan did oblige over-mighty unions too much in its efforts to buy industrial peace. So did Margaret Thatcher until she got them exactly where she wanted to administer a duffing. They were hard times, the 70s.

But after Thatcher won power and made Hailsham (Douglas "moat" Hogg's father incidentally) her Lord Chancellor in 1979 we heard no more of elective dictatorships – though millions of Britons regard her own excesses as the most serious threat to liberty in decades. As, I say these things are often subjective: who is doing what to whom.

Enter stage right Ken Clarke who did his own share of assaulting the liberties of local government, unions and much else during the Thatcher-Major era, some of its justified, some less so. Speaking at a dinner for judges in Mansion House on Tuesday he reportedly said that parliament's ability to hold the executive – the government – to account has weakened to the point where "the state has accrued more intrusive and more invasive powers. We disregard this at our peril."

Well, good for Ken. And let's see how he gets on too. There is nothing like a sinner coming to repent in old age – he has just turned 70 – as he contemplates the awful day of judgement: the day when he is packed off to the House of Lords on his Zimmer frame.

"Under the new government, parliament must be returned to its rightful place as the centre of public debate, the arbiter of better drafted, better thought out and less prolific legislation, and a more powerful check on the executive," said Ken.

Splendid, splendid. As someone else who mourns the passing of the old Commons – I am not much younger than Clarke – it appeals to me. But unlike him I am dimly aware that the world has moved on. I do not think Ken uses the internet much, let alone posts his intimate feelings ("God, I could do with a drink") on Facebook.

When the going gets tougher quite soon – and the Lib Dems tire of their new long trousers – I am not sure the Tory chief whip, ex-miner Patrick McLoughlin, will be so keen to liberate backbenchers either. My impression so far – very encouraging — is that there are some smart, energetic new backbenchers on both sides. You can catch them showing off at daily question time on the parliament channel.

At the same dinner, the lord chief justice, the aptly named Lord Judge, appealed to the new government to stop behaving like Henry VIII, not in his love life but in his even dirtier habit of creating laws which allows ministers of the Crown to bypass parliament via statutory instruments or secondary legislation that allows them to extend or repeal laws without minimal constraint.

As you would expect, this is a more subtle point than Ken's, made by a more subtle lawyer. New Labour drafted a bill, the regulatory reform bill, to allow ministers to repeal all sorts of daft laws but its powers were too sweeping and lawyers took fright. Again, parliament did its job and the bill was watered down: the liberty-loving media took little notice.

Ministers in the coalition claim to be sensitive to this point too and I hope they are. But, as with leaks and briefings to the media before MPs, this government is already showing signs of acting as governments do. It is not that they are bad people, it is just that they face conflicting pressures – not least from the liberty-loving media.

Of course, a lot of the problems voters face are caused by over-zealous council officials, police officers or CSOs, not by governments though ministers should act to curb misplaced zeal. They're often egged on by newspapers which purport to hate the nanny state but also want their readers to be protected from every dodgy paving stone and barking dog.

One test of the coalition's civil liberty credentials is the right of trade unions to withdraw their labour after undertaking statutory ballots imposed during the Thatcher era. Here the smoke signals from Whitehall are not good. There is talk of further restrictions.

Do I expect Ken Clarke to express alarm or Lord Hailsham to rise from his grave in protest? No.